Research

Scott Jordan will be speaking at the 3rd Real Estate Crowdfunding Summit in New York on Wednesday, October 14th, the second event in iGlobal Forum’s Tech Reboot 3.0 series.

The phenomenal growth of real estate crowdfunding has outpaced every other industry—including technology—since the SEC legalized investment crowdfunding in September 2013. Crowdfunding provides real estate developers and syndicators with a new way to raise capital, and offers investors a new way to access this asset class beyond private equity and REITs.

San Antonio, Texas- based GenSpera (GNSV) is a biotechnology company engaged in the development of targeted prodrug therapies for the treatment of human solid tumor cancers.

The company’s drug development portfolio is based on a potential first in class, plant derived cytotoxin named thapsigargin, which is isolated from the seeds of a plant that grows naturally in countries around the Mediterranean.

The Company’s lead drug candidate, G-202, is a prodrug formulation of a thapsigargin based cytotoxin that is bioactivated by the enzyme Prostate Specific Membrane Antigen (PSMA).

“…it’s no wonder that every big drug company wants to be “Partner of Choice” with smaller innovators. Nearly every pharma has hired consultants at some point to help it position its BD strategy more effectively.” – Bruce Booth, “Transformational Late Stage Drugs Delivered Through Deal Making,” Forbes, 3/21/14

“ …it’s a widely-held belief that a critical element of exceptional R&D organizations in the future will be creative BD engagement. In short, great BD and R&D are becoming synonymous with each other.” – Bruce Booth, “External Innovation: Force Multiplier For R&D,” Forbes, 6/26/2015

“The past two years (2013-2014) have seen more IPOs (173) than the cumulative total of the prior decade…M&A has also been strong…biotech has seen 85 “big exits” over the past six years reaching an average upfront and total deal value of $366M and $507M in 2014 (30-50% higher than just five years ago).” – Bruce Booth, “Startups, Exits, and Ecosystem Flux: Bullish for Biotech” Forbes, 9/8/2014

“Nearly $26B in real or potentially liquid distributions have been generated over the past two years alone. This is 3-4x more than has been invested over that period of time by VCs into biotech; distributions vastly outstripping investments is certainly positive biomarker for the venture sector.” – Bruce Booth, “Venture Backed Biotech Today, Bruce Booth, Forbes 1/22/15

“Over time, about 25% of any given quarters’ financings are for newly backed startups (”first financings”); further, the overall number of quarterly biotech financings have been relatively constant at ~120 companies…this implies that the typical life of a venture-backed biotech (at least with regard to their venture financing needs) must be about ~4 years. This data suggest that within that period of time, most biotech’s must seal their fate – either via death (shutting down) or by no longer needing venture funding (e.g., IPO, M&A, non-dilutive deal making self sufficiency). Otherwise, if it took a longer time on average to reach that fate, we’d see an increasing pool of biotech companies getting venture financed over time, which we largely haven’t over the past decade.”

“…it’s no wonder that every big drug company wants to be “Partner of Choice” with smaller innovators. Nearly every pharma has hired consultants at some point to help it position its BD strategy more effectively”

“While the list itself is interesting, and each drug could be a blockbuster, I wanted to call attention to something the Goldman report and many others haven’t highlighted directly: the instrumental and essential role of smart business development deal-making underpinning these projects.”

Trends

“…while the number of VC-backed M&A exits is in line with prior years (~25 per year), the value both in terms of upfront and full “biobuck” (~milestones) potential have reached new highs, topping over $5 and $8 billion, respectively.”

Access Capital via “External R&D”

“….private VC-funded biotech is a tiny fraction of the scale of the bigger BioPharma part of the sector in every major financial dimension. Small percentile changes to a Big BioPharma company’s market can swamp the scale of the biotech sector…..because of the scale difference, even small changes in the resource allocation practices within large BioPharma companies’ coffer has the potential to dramatically alter the biotech ecosystem. Assume these big BioPharma companies channeled just ~5% of their balance sheet cash into private biotech companies – this capital flow would fully fund the entire VC-backed biotech sector for a year (~50 companies).”

SUMMIT, N.J. & CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – April 15, 2010 – Celgene Corporation (NASDAQ: CELG) and Agios Pharmaceuticals Inc., a privately-held biotechnology company, today announced the formation of a global strategic collaboration focused on targeting cancer metabolism. The goal of the collaboration is to discover, develop, and deliver novel disease-altering therapies in oncology based on the transformational science of Agios’ innovative cancer metabolism research platform. This platform is based on the concept that targeting key metabolic enzymes unique to rapidly proliferating cancer cells can “starve” the cancer.